Alec Baldwin said he has only one unresolved question about the fatal shooting on the "Rust" film set: "Where did the live round come from?"
Baldwin detailed his shock and disbelief after the Oct. 21 shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, 42, and discussed the moments before it in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that aired Thursday.
"There’s only one question to be resolved, only one, and that is where did the live round come from?" Baldwin said.
“Where did that bullet come from?” he said. “Somebody brought live rounds — plural — onto the set of the film. And one of them ended up in that gun.”
The actor and producer said he was rehearsing a scene when the prop gun went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza, 48, at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico. The shooting is under investigation.
In the interview, Baldwin insisted that he did not pull the trigger. In the scene, he was to draw his gun, raise it "and start to cock the pistol — cut," he said.
Baldwin said he was taking direction from Hutchins and pulled the hammer back as far as he could without cocking it.
"I’m just showing her, I go, ‘How about that? Does that work? Do you see that?' ... She said, 'yeah, that's good.'" Baldwin told Stephanopoulos. “I let go of the hammer — bang, the gun goes off."
"I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never," he said.
Baldwin said that he was told that the gun was empty and that he was so certain it was, that the idea that there was a live round in it didn't dawn on him until close to an hour after the shooting.
He initially believed Hutchins had fainted, he said.
Baldwin said that only near the end of an interview with police when a sheriff’s official showed him an image of the .45-caliber slug recovered from Souza did he learn it was a live round.
“And then the kind of insanity-inducing agony of thinking that someone put a live bullet in the gun,” he said.
Immediately after the shooting, much of the attention fell on assistant director Dave Halls, who had yelled “cold gun” on the “Rust” set before he gave Baldwin the weapon, indicating incorrectly that it didn’t have any live rounds, investigators said in a search warrant affidavit.
Halls’ attorney, Lisa Torraco, has maintained that her client didn’t hand the gun to Baldwin and that checking to see whether it was loaded wasn’t the assistant director’s responsibility.
In an interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Torraco said Halls has been telling her for weeks that Baldwin didn’t pull the trigger on the “Rust” set.
“Since Day One, he thought it was a misfire,” Torraco said. “And until Alec said that, it was really hard to believe but Dave has told me since the very first day I met him that Alec did not pull that trigger.”
Baldwin, who said it’s unlikely he’ll ever be in a movie that features a gun again, said in the interview that aired Thursday that he did not wish to portray himself as a victim, but said he has been plagued by dreams involving gunfire.
But, he feels no guilt, he said.
"I feel that someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is,” Baldwin said. "But I know it’s not me."
He told Stephanopoulos that if he could, he "would go to any lengths to undo what happened."
No one has been arrested or criminally charged in connection with the shooting, which is being investigated by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
A spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office told NBC News Thursday morning that his agency would not discuss Baldwin's interview.
After the shooting, the district attorney for Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said pressing charges could be a challenge.
She told NBC News that any potential charge tied to an “involuntary killing” would need “to show the willful disregard for the safety of others.”
“And so at this point, we are trying to figure out, should it become a criminal investigation? Should it become more of a civil investigation? So it’s an investigation,” Carmack-Altwies said a week after the killing.
